A poster on macOSXHints has posted an applescript for Quicksilver which provides a quick list of words, characters and lines in the form of a Growl alert.

After copying the text of the script to Script Editor and saving it off in your ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions folder, all you need to do is select some text, activate a “Command window with Selection” and then type “word” (or whatever matches the name you gave to the script when saving),:

The Growl alert is quick and simple:

Of course, this is not the only way to get a word count in Quicksilver.

Spell Catcher X’s statistics service is available within Quicksilver and provides even more information, including how much fog is in your prose:

Spell Catcher X is shareware (USD 39.95) but good enough to be in my Top Ten Things every Mail.app user should have. not apple mail, word count, characters, words, applescript, quicksilver, productivity, tips, growl

OmniGrowl is described by its developer as “an expandable framework for sending Growl Notifications for applications that do not natively support Growl”.

(Growl is a pop-up notification system for OS X that installs itself as a Preference Pane. Depending on how you work, Growl can either enhance your productivity or distract you to death.)

Once installed, users can set it through Growl’s main preferences to provide alerts from iCal, Address Book, iTunes, power status changes (battery or AC), RSS feed alerts, SMART hard-drive failure reports, alerts from Software Update and more.

It offers a full range of options for iCal alerts, each of which can be set independently or even switched-off altogether: Alerts for iCal events in one hour, 30 minutes or 10 minutes, alerts for all-day events and to-dos the day before.

Alerts can also be set for birthdays stored in Address Book and iCal.

In deference to GrowlTunes and other modules which display iTunes track changes, its iTunes settings are turned off by default. Still, the developer includes it as a way of making OmniGrowl a comprehensive app and potentially to reduce the number of apps one needs to run.

It can also display hourly alerts from RSS feeds. CNN, BBC and The New York Times are included by default, but the interface makes it easy to add extra feeds (up to 16 in total) that you particularly want to keep an eye on.

A recent update adds support for AFP alerts, “a pretty specialized need” that lets you know when AFP users connect or disconnect to your computer.

If you live in Canada (oddly the home of a disproportionate number of Mail.app-related developers), it now also tells you about local concerts and events by polling the Canadian OnTour web site.

It is open source and designed with customisation in mind (source code and some instructions included).

OminGrowl is donation-ware and available from the developer’s web site .productivity, notifications, ical, address book, itunes, growl, alerts, rss,

Two months ago, Hawk Wings posted about an iCal hack for using Growl to display its alerts. It was clever, complicated and sacrificed the ability to email alerts.

Thomas Aylott has improved on the hack , writing a smarter script that enables Growl notifications by default, but which preserves the ability to email alerts as normal.

It is still complicated and involves digging around in the iCal package, replacing scripts. If you like that kind of thing and you like Growl, you will want to try it out for yourself.ical, growl, notifications, alerts, hacks, applescript, productivity

In the past year Hawk Wings has carried 91 posts about iCal.

The following are the five that I personally found most useful or interesting:

1. Create overlapping events in iCal more easily.
2. Adjusting visible iCal hours on the fly.
3. Get weather in Google Calendar, iCal.
4. Brainstorming an iCal-Mail.app mash-up.
5. iCalViewer: Streaming iCal onto your Desktop.

ical, tips, events, growl, delayed email, mail.app, apple mail, Google, calendar

The web has thrown up two interesting Thunderbird links today.

Neil Turner provides a tutorial on getting Growl to notify you of new messages in Thunderbird.

The tip requires you to install the Yamb (“Yet another Mail Biff”) extension and to do a few things in the Terminal, but the end result is nice (as you can see in Neil’s screenshot):

Katy Whitton describes how she uses Thunderbird to implement David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system.

She outlines her carefully considered Thunderbird tweak, moving step-by-step through her message triage, mailbox setup, the required extensions and her template arrangements.

You might want to compare this with Entropic Principle’s post on Thunderbird and GTD and/or consider how well Mail.app does the same thing .thunderbird, mail.app, apple mail, GTD, productivity, growl, notification, yamb, tips

A thread on Cocoa|forge discusses some ways in which you can hack iCal so that it will display its alarms through Growl.

Suggestions centre on modifying iCal’s internal applescripts to send iCal notifications to Growls Helper.app so that Growl catches them, following a modification of the instructions in an old macOSXHints, which routes notifications through sendmail.

A further interface hack replaces the “Email” alarm option with a “Growl” one.

The downside to this is that you sacrifice the ability to send notifications via email.

It seems like a lot of work to me, but if you are into that sort of thing – and never forget to back things up first – you will enjoy the challenge.ical, growl, notifications, hacks, applescript, tips

Adam Rice has posted a long, detailed and creative account of how he structures his notifications in Mail.app.

Through a careful combination of Address Book Groups and Mail rules, he has established at least three differing levels of notification.

Emails from friends are announced with a spoken alert, using one of the several applescripts around that can do that.

Emails from clients are distinguished by a special “Work” chime and a Growl alert.

Emails from people he hasn’t corresponded with before are shunted to a ‘holding pen’, one step away from the Junk folder.

It’s a clever system that could easily be modified to your own needs and correspondence patterns. As a meticulous documenter of these things, I thought it deserved recording :)email, mail.app, apple mail, notification, applescript, growl, tips